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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925315">The Boy Wonder</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronAndRags/pseuds/IronAndRags'>IronAndRags</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>World's Finest [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:41:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,268</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925315</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronAndRags/pseuds/IronAndRags</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Batman keeps Chicago's streets safe, and Arkham Asylum in the black. But no man is a hero to his valet - still less to his underage ward. Dick Grayson would really rather be anyone else.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>World's Finest [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044801</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If you mention at a party (and it has to be the right kind of party) that you ran into him on a rooftop, rainsoaked - perfect weather for a joy buzzer - everybody wants to know. Everybody wants to hear about the Joker. So you, Dick Grayson, have no choice but to oblige.</p><p>Here's the thing about the Joker: he's just some guy. He's some guy whose face is kind of messed up, who accentuates his messed-up face by daubing talcum powder on his sallow cheeks and ladies' lipstick on his long, thin lips. He's only scary for the same reason that any of Batman's rogue's gallery of Chicago super-foes is scary: he has a gun, and he has money, and a bunch of other guys with guns are willing to accept that money in order to point their guns at targets of his (the Joker's) choosing. In this way, the Joker is kind of like Batman. Much has been made of this.</p><p>So when he's standing on the opposite side of an east-side rooftop, waving his revolver in your general direction and calling you a "two-bit carny stripper", what you do is duck, first of all, and spin around before he gets a decent lock on you again, and then you kick him really hard. Then he falls over, because, again, the Joker is just some guy. He's not particularly good at fighting. He doesn't really care about Batman per se, except insofar as selling crack cocaine between whatshisface avenue and the river is more challenging when the Batman keeps busting up your suppliers. So, the Joker isn't happy, but he drops the gun, and falls on his ass, and you get him in a headlock and you don't let his long, kicky legs get near you. He calls you names that would probably be very offensive to a gay man with a difficult history, but which do not especially bother you, at that moment, on that rain-soaked rooftop. He's a clown, is what he is, and not the funny kind. He is also a case study in why you need to shave, assiduously, if you're going to do the makeup thing. Batman eventually arrives, and the Joker is delivered with all due haste to the proper authorities. That's the story.</p><p>A lot of girls find this story disappointing, and drift in the direction of Harvey Dent, who is putting on a show for a gaggle of fascinated young women (and some possibly-boyfriends) about locking up Calendar Man - to hear him tell it, you would think that it was Harvey Dent who had delivered that guy, bruised and battered, to the Chicago PD in the middle of the night, with a batarang pinning his wrists to the small of his back. Certain colorful details from that, the exciting part of the Calendar Man saga, are being liberally sprinkled in along with details of the actual murders. What the fuck is it with girls and serial killers, anyway, you wonder. He's not going to kill <i>you</i>, Rachel, he's getting his arms re-broken at Arkham Asylum.</p><p>Chicago used to be a more exciting place. There were other Jokers, for example, before this most recent crime boos, and that's probably who Hope and Becky and Rachel and Andi were expecting you to talk about. There was the guy who shot all those people in the 70s, for instance. Or the one with the gas. That guy is in a very well-sealed room at Arkham, probably, if he isn't dead already. He was before your time, in any event. One time, a girl at one of these parties - Anna something, Karama-something - suggested to you that Batman should be looking into the way the patients are treated at Arkham, and why they're stonewalling federal oversight about something and how so-and-so at the Washington Post said that the building wasn't close to up to code. You struggled to explain to this girl that what she was describing was not really in the Batman's bailiwick. She was not satisfied by this response, and told you so. Nothing happened with Anna Karama-something that night, obviously. It occurs to you, not for the first time, that Bruce probably gets laid at every single one of these miserable fucking mixers. He really doesn't need to try that hard; he should be satisfied with what he's got - but of course, Bruce is never satisfied.</p><p>That's why he's the Batman. And that's why you're Dick Grayson, candy-striper comic relief sidekick for Chicago's richest and most exquisitely muscled cosplayer. You are already pre-regretting your third cocktail of the night as you down the second one, and, seeing no center of gravity at this party to which you could gravitate where doing so would not entail either an ugly confrontation with mister big-swinging-dick District Attorney, or (worse) a conversation with Bruce, you start heading for the exit. Alfred's waiting in the car, and he'll be able to take you home and return before Bruce has fed the financial advisor in the slim dress half as many cocktails as she'll need before she can be spirited away to the Batcave.</p><p>Before you reach the big French doors, however, disaster strikes, and Bruce intercepts you. He pulls you into a side hug that makes you want to vomit. In fairness, the nausea may not be Bruce's fault. He is a big, powerful guy, with powerful cologne. You have very little to complain about in life, really. Benefactor like that.</p><p>But Bruce is explaining to this black-rimmed-glasses whats-his-name - probably, you imagine, another one of these rocketry guys that he's been so keen on lately - Bruce is explaining to this guy how he came to take you on, as his ward, after the "accident" and all of that. Bruce is telling this story very cheerfully. Glasses is looking at Bruce with a sort of blank expression, which is not surprising. Bruce is describing the death of your parents. You try not to be too obvious about overfilling Bruce's glass - you like him better, in some ways, when he's drunk.</p><p>In some ways. It makes him easier to manage, for sure. But no matter how you slice it, you'll be going home to the Batcave. You wiggle the shot glass out of his hand and down it yourself. He doesn't stop you.</p><p>Sometimes you fantasize about the Joker shooting up Wayne Manor, while you're tucked away in the darkest cellar of the Batcave. But it never happens. Batman always gets his guy.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Calendar Man was pretty much just a regular serial killer, is the thing. You have a better story about him than Harvey does, even if you don't like to tell it. It's one of those stories that you keep for yourself, on dark nights when the Chicago sky is raining like it did in the days of Noah. No ark-builder this time. All these people have is Bruce. You learned that well enough, with the Calendar Man case.</p><p>So, here's your story about the Calendar Man: Ever since the Zodiac Killer, the types of guys who were liable to become serial killers had gotten it into their heads that they needed to have a theme if they were going to be raping and murdering women at random. Batman and his whole schtick probably didn't help with this trend; it just reinforced the idea that the theme was really important. Anyway. Calendar Man wasn't just a poser like the Riddler; he actually did tie women up and cut their throats with a kitchen knife and draw shit on the walls with their blood. The first one was on Christmas - Kitty Seneschal, coming home late from an office party, downtown. He dragged her into a black car with no license plates, and tied her up, and took out one of his big long knives, and so on and so forth. Classic front-page stuff. He got three other young women on the same night, in different parts of the city, and for a few unbelievable days, the police latched onto the Christmas thing - logically enough, you suppose, tabloid headlines blaring about "The Christmas Killer" was a downright embarrassment. Luckily, for the dignity of the city of Chicago, he showed up again on New Year's and raped and murdered six more, between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. It turned out his thing was just holidays, in general. Go figure.</p><p>Much more so than the two-bit carnival freak currently portraying the Joker, Calendar Man was a genuine crazy guy. He had some weird psychosexual thing going on. Too many Times editorials by guys who take the Freud stuff seriously, and these guys starting thinking it's real, starting putting themselves into this weird Oedipal box where they need to be like Ted Bundy because their mom didn't buy them enough ice cream as a little kid. That's your theory, at least. Whatever. Stuff like that is for the shrinks at Arkham to figure out, when they let these guys take a break from being sedated out of their minds. Your job was (is) to get the stupid bastards locked up, so people like Kitty Seneschal can walk back from their office parties on dark nights.</p><p>So, at one point, the World's Greatest Detective ascertained, via his network of surveillance cameras, that the Calendar Man was probably conducting his debaucheries in the basement of a green-painted bungalow on Hardwood street - not the ideal neighborhood for a bust-down-the-door, shit-your-pants surprise heist, insofar as it was a white neighborhood and it would get on the news and there weren't any tall buildings or Chicago PD facilities sufficiently nearby to make it easy on him. So Bruce decided to do something risky: he was going to knock on the door, as Bruce Wayne, ostensibly to talk to the resident - Mr. Kaspar Kupowycz, the suspect in question - about schools for orphans or some similar cause. Then, as Bruce Wayne, he would scope out the building, and deposit a surveillance camera and a smoke bomb that could be remotely detonated, and maybe a few other gadgets of similar description. So, at a time when Batman's cell phone radar indicated that Mr. Kupowycz was in the basement (doing, naturally, God can only guess what), he shed his costume and went down to knock on what he then believed to be the Calendar Man's door. You watched by drone, from a wall-sized screen in the Batcave. You saw how long it took for Mr. Kupowycz to answer the door, and you saw that when he did, he-</p><p>Actually, though you hate to keep your audience in suspense, you realize at this moment that you'd rather leave your story about the Calendar Man there, and continue to retell the events of the night of the party, the one where Bruce was talking to the Raytheon guy with the black-rimmed glasses, and you'd had a little bit too much to drink. You fear that seeing through the story of the Calendar Man to its bitter conclusion would affect your audience's sense of Bruce too much; you want to let them get to know your guardian a little better, before you take them into the darkest chamber.</p><p>Speaking of dark chambers, it was hard for you to believe, for most of your life, that there were any darker than the Batcave. At its deepest level, the cave extended to a mile and a half below the surface of the earth; and all the modern central heating systems Bruce installed (increasingly elaborate over the years) could not dispel the pervasive chill, the moist feeling of being in a dripping cavern, far away from the help of human civilization. It was into this cave - this laboratory, bedroom, crypt, museum, playpen, boardroom, office - that you descended, after a heavy night of "partying" at Bruce's mixer. It was a decidedly two-faced feature of your unofficial "job" as Bruce's ward. You went to functions with him. Alfred, knowing you intimately, handed you the robe you liked to wear when you were in the cave. The wall-sized screens were dark; only a few blinking lights reminded you that this space could be a humming workshop, on darker nights.</p><p>Alfred left the lights off, knowing you; he knew, of course, that you kept a flashlight on your keychain for this very purpose, so that you could stumble through the dark to your little alcove off of the main cave and flop into your bed, without feeling like you were disturbing an entire household. Not that Bruce was home. Not that Alfred cared. It was the principle of the thing.</p><p>Your alcove was warmer than the rest of the cave, and the air mattress smelled like you; it smelled like comfort. You slept here more often than you did in your proper bedroom, these days. It was hard for you to articulate why. Bruce hadn't asked you about it, yet. He seemed quietly disappointed. You weren't sure what you would say if he did ask. Next to the air mattress, on the cold floor, you kept a reading lamp, a half-finished book (at the time, it was "The Metamorphosis", which had not been doing wonders for your mood), and a water bottle, for when you woke up in the night with your throat like suffocating sandpaper. Anyway. You were too wobbly to read, on this particular night. You lay on your mattress, sleep not coming to you.</p><p>When Bruce came home, you learned that he wanted to have a talk.</p><p>And that's why this night was different from all other nights. Bruce never wanted to talk to you.</p>
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